Lack of Internal Talks at Microsoft, Google

Maybe my “Microsoft’s Entertainment Domination” theory was a bit premature. Apparently, the Zune MP3 player isn’t flying off shelves and now it turns out that the Zune is incompatible with Microsoft’s latest Windows Vista operating system. Amazing how a disconnect like this can occur within an organization. Software start-ups are taking advantage of the lowered development costs and the speedy development time — and forcing large software organizations to speed up their own development cycles, but in the process, the large organizations are fumbling to communicate effectively amongst their departments.

A disconnect is happening over at Google as well. Their policy of allowing employees to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them, mixed with rapid headcount growth, and pressure from Wall Street to keep up their impressive growth, has led to an obvious lack of conversations internally.

Last month, Sergey Brin began leading an initiative at Google focused on “Features, not products,” because the 50+ products in various development stages available at Google.com were beginning to lead to user confusion. One of Google’s top priorities is trying to replace desktop applications with web-based applications and tap into Microsoft’s $12 billion annual revenue stream from Office-related software. That initiative started with Gmail (for email), and has led to Google Docs (formerly Writely), Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, and the rumored GDrive (for file storage, code-named “Platypus“). But if I’m pulling reports from Google Analytics, Google AdSense, or Google AdWords, I can only export them to Excel — not save (or open) directly into Google Spreadsheets. If I’m in Gmail, any ‘.doc’ attachments should open in Google Docs — they don’t currently.

Thanks to Eric Nagel for the Google observation.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree to Standard Sitemaps Protocol

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

The protocol is offered under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, so it can be used by any search engine, derivative variations using the same license can be created and it can be used for commercial purposes.

Any time competitors agree on open standards, that’s an enabler of further innovation and something to celebrate. It’s also great to see Creative Commons receiving all the more validation.

Search engine guru Danny Sullivan wrote the following tonight about the move.

Overall, I’m thrilled. It took nearly a decade for the search engines to go from unifying around standards for blocking spidering and making page description to agreeing on the nofollow attribute for links in January 2005. A wait of nearly two years for the next unified move is a long time, but far less than 10 and progress that’s very welcomed. I applaud the three search engines for all coming together and look forward to more to come.

Several people have made early public statements indicating that the next move will be to develop meaningful standards support for robots.txt files. Imagine a future when these players agree on standards for user control of data, microformats or truly neutral party click-fraud tracking and prevention. Maybe that’s crazy.